Book review | Between the World and Me: Thoughts on race fatherly, poignant

Wednesday

Aug 26, 2015 at 12:01 AMAug 27, 2015 at 9:00 AM

In light of the staggering violence surrounding African-American communities in the past year, the metaphor of the imperiled "black body" that recurs throughout Between the World and Me seems particularly appropriate. The semi-autobiographical novel is composed as a letter from the author to his 14-year-old son, but Ta-Nehisi Coates is writing to himself as much as to anyone else and to America as much as to himself. He opens with an explanation of the impossibility of the American dream for a black body.

In light of the staggering violence surrounding African-American communities in the past year, the metaphor of the imperiled “black body” that recurs throughout Between the World and Me seems particularly appropriate.

The semi-autobiographical novel is composed as a letter from the author to his 14-year-old son, but Ta-Nehisi Coates is writing to himself as much as to anyone else and to America as much as to himself.

He opens with an explanation of the impossibility of the American dream for a black body.

As he says to his son, the real question — to be pursued even until death — involves how to live freely in a body still not free.

A fear of destruction courses through black communities, as expressed in the fights, the weapons, the police and an unrelenting system.

Although he took to books more than to the streets, Coates felt the fear — and still does, he writes.

Coates, unlike many of his peers, rejected religion: Malcolm X became his god; and the Chancellor Williams book The Destruction of Black Civilization, his bible.

At Howard University in Washington, D.C., Coates was exposed to a variety of perspectives, including those of professors and poets who challenged him to realize that not only black Americans had been pushed to the margins.

He left Howard without a degree, using journalism to continue questioning the divide between himself and much of the world.

Soon after school came the birth of son Samori, named for African military leader Samori Toure, and a renewed reason to struggle for the soundness of the black body.

As he recalls the unjust slaying of a college acquaintance and the shoving of Samori by a woman who thinks she is white (his description of Caucasian Americans), the author determines that the crushing of blacks is embedded in American traditions.

And yet, in the last few pages, the switch flips.

The pain hasn’t changed; the fear hasn’t disappeared.

Still, within the suffering, “We made ourselves a people,” Coates writes.

The often-harsh, though poetic, language might not be easily digested by readers whose knowledge of the black American struggle is limited to the work of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

When the words are allowed to rest for a minute, however, Between the World and Me turns into an eloquent and thought-provoking treatise on race at a time when such eloquence seems in short supply.

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